IBOutlet not getting set in Cocoa MVC project

Question

I might not be using IBOutlet correctly, or some other subtlety with how NIB files work is causing me trouble - any help would be much appreciated (feel free to propose an alternate way to accomplish what I want).

I have a View object and a Controller object. Both are in the NIB. The Controller's init is also called when the NIB is loaded and the View is initialized in the 'awakeFromNib' callback. I need a way to connect these two objects - specifically, enable the 'View' object to call functions on the Controller.

Based on documentation online, the way to get these connected is to define an IBOutlet in the View and connect it to the Controller in the Interface Builder. So i created an

IBOutlet Controller* _controller;

in the View interface and graphically connected it to the Controller object in Interface Builder by making a connection from the View to the Controller and assigning the _controller outlet to the Controller (the blue Generic Object box in Interface Builder).

At runtime though, _controller is always _nil. I have verified that the Controller's init was indeed called.

Is there something obvious I'm missing about this? Any simpler way to connect these two? Since they're both created by the NIB I don't have a common object that has a pointer to both.

Answer 1

Try accessing the IBOutlet in viewDidLoad instad.

When awakeFromNib is called not all the IBOutlets are populated (even though the documentation seem to imply it).